Attribution Tracking Solved for SaaS Companies

Attribution Tracking Solved for SaaS Companies

Dylan Touhey

If you run a subscription service with a free trial, you'll know that it's nearly impossible to track your paid subscribers back to the referring keyword or ad campaign. With standard Google Analytics tracking you can only track the sign up — the form submit that starts your customers into their free trial.

Google Analytics is incapable of identifying when your free trial customer converts to a paying subscriber at the end of their 30 day free trial. While you can use the Google Adwords Offline Converison Tracking tool to import your paid subscriber data into Adwords this data will not be pulled into Analytics. This makes it impossible to identify the referring keyword / campaigns and view your "free-to-paid" conversion funnel in Google Analytics for customers that complete their free trial and upgrade to paying subscribers.

We developed this attribution tracking spec to show you how you can fill the void and track your paid subscribers back to the referring keyword or campaign after they convert to a paying customer.

This technical spec shows you how to extract the referring campaign variables from the GA cookie to store in your database. Once you have the GA variables in your database you can identify the referring keyword, and campaign when your free trial users convert to paying subscribers. The data is then available for funnel analysis and reporting in Google Analytics.

Attribution Tracking Solved for SaaS Companies

If you run a subscription service with a free trial, you’ll know that it’s nearly impossible to track your paid subscribers back to the referring keyword or ad campaign. With standard Google Analytics tracking you can only track the sign up — the form submit that starts your customers into their free trial.